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Introduction Introduction When you are in Paris you will no doubt have an opportunity of seeing Daguerre’s pictures. I shall be glad to hear from you, what you think of them. Whatever their merit, which no doubt is very great, I think that in one respect our English method must have the advantage. To obtain a second copy of the same view, Daguerre must return to the same locality & set up his instrument a second time; for he cannot copy from his metallic plate, being opaque. But in our method, having first obtained one picture by means of the Camera, the rest are obtainable from this one, by the method of re-transferring which, by a fortunate & beautiful circumstance rectifies both of the errors in the first picture at once. viz. the inversion of right for left; & that of light for shade. —William Henry Fox Talbot to John Frederick William Herschel, April 27, 1839 (Herschel, emphasis in original) I have so much to do and such a disinclination to multiply my “coun- terfeit presentments.” —Charles Dickens to John J. E. Mayall, 1856 (Letters 8:199) n 1856, Charles Dickens declined John J. E. Mayall’s request to sit for a Idaguerreotype, explaining he had “a disinclination to multiply” his “coun- terfeit presentments” (Letters 8:199). The author, a celebrity at that point in his career, had been the subject of numerous daguerreotypes before—many by Mayall—and would sit for daguerreotypists and other photographers again. In this letter, however, he articulates what became a hallmark not only of his celebrity but also the broader challenge to photography this book interrogates. Dickens’s complaint is threefold: he is busy, he does not want his image to be multiplied, and he feels such images are counterfeit. xv © 2019 State University of New York Press, Albany xvi Introduction Although he writes here about daguerreotypy—a nonreproducible form of photography—and not a reproducible form such as calotypy or the collo- dion process, the salient features of his critique are also distinctive qualities of negatives. Specifically, the multiplication of the image and distortion of reality that troubles Dickens about posing for a daguerreotype are even more pronounced in photographs with negatives. Indeed, these multiplication and distortion issues are absolutely central features of the negative process. In Victorian Negatives, I argue that both technical and figurative appre- ciations of the photographic negative are fundamental to understanding how nineteenth-century photography came to be culturally embedded and expressed through literary works of the period. Furthermore, the negative gives us a new and useful means of historicizing Victorian debates surrounding origins and copies, particularly as these debates played out in the literary arena. The negative is a technology that facilitates image inversion and reproduction. These qualities are essential to the photographic imagination as it developed through- out the nineteenth century, and they played a role in how that imagination in turn shaped literary genres such as the historical novel, detective fiction, Gothic narratives, and—perhaps most significant—the realist novel. In the chapters that follow, I examine several experimental photographic forms and techniques that rely on or are in conversation with negative technology, and I trace how these negative-based techniques were understood and articulated in literary culture—a culture likewise invested in the art of representation. Notions of photographic reproducibility and verisimilitude may appear in sync with the aims of Victorian literary realism, but writers such as Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. W. Hornung, Cyril Bennett, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker complicate these qualities in their lives and works, at times expressing concern about and at other times interest in how negative technologies erode older ideals of repre- sentational truth as well as ideas of singularity and artistic control. They do this by featuring failed or troubled photographic reproduction within their works and challenging visual objectivity obliquely and metaphorically across their oeuvres. Several also resist photographic reproduction directly in their lives as celebrity authors. Rather than focusing on literary texts or literary lives in isolation, I see the two as entwined: literary texts and the role of literary celebrity within and beyond those texts reveal a negotiation with the negative, and a reading of one without the other misses the extent to which the negative troubles the barrier between art and life. The negative is an essential part of photography’s nineteenth-century history. In May 1844, Scottish photographer and politician George Smith Cundell published “On the Practice of the Calotype Process of Photography” © 2019 State University of New York Press, Albany Introduction xvii in the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. Cundell champions calotypy, a paper-negative photographic process that had, up to that point, somewhat languished in the shadows of daguerreo- typy. As Cundell notes, “If the comparative merits of the Daguerreotype and of the Calotype were to be judged by the interest which each has excited, or by the progress which has been made in the practice of either, the English invention [the calotype] would justly be classed in a very subordinate rank” (321). This, he goes on to claim, is because “while the Daguerreotype was at once understood, and successfully practised, over the whole civilized world, most of the few persons who have attempted the sister art, after failing of success, have given it up in disappointment” (321). The calotype process disappointed so many, according to Cundell, because its inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot, had maintained a patent and tight control over the details of the process since 1841.1 In publishing his paper, Cundell hoped to bring these details of calotypy to light: “there is reason to believe,” he writes, “that it only requires to be better known to be appreciated as an art not less beautiful than that of Daguerre, and that it is well deserving of a much greater share than it has yet received of the public attention” (321). Its virtues, he claims, are numerous, and among them is that the process “requires but little apparatus; its materials are comparatively inexpensive; and it is possessed besides of the striking advantage, of yielding a great number of perfect copies from every original picture” (321). The calotype process differs from the daguerreotype process in several key ways, but as Cundell notes, its primary difference is in its use of a negative, from which it is possible to make many “perfect” copies of the image.2 Whereas daguerreotypes are unique photographic objects for which there is no negative, calotypes are produced or “retransferred” using a paper negative or “reverse,” as photographers such as Talbot, John Frederick Wil- liam Herschel, and others called it.3 This process has a distinct advantage, writes Talbot in his letter to Herschel on April 27, 1839. Indeed, in 1851 Frederick Scott Archer developed the negative further with the glass-negative wet collodion process. This process produced a sharper final image that was easier and faster to reproduce than the calotype process and also ultimately contributed to the decline of the daguerreotype. Collodion-based processes went on to dominate the photographic scene from the 1850s through the 1880s, the notion of “a great number of perfect copies” becoming ever more part of the definition of the photograph. According to Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography, “The daguerreotype was doomed” from this point on, its “disadvantage” the fact that “each picture was unique” and the process relatively expensive (28, 19). © 2019 State University of New York Press, Albany xviii Introduction Cundell’s preference for the negative process over daguerreotypy is typical of many photographers in the era. Amateur photographer George Shadbolt notes in an 1864 British Journal of Photography essay that whereas he suffered “disappointment on finding the expensive nature of the materi- als requisite for pursing” the daguerreotype, he felt “gratification at being able to repeat the experiments” of the calotype (199). Writing in 1859, photographic entrepreneur Francis Frith likewise admits that while the daguerreotype is “very beautiful,” “the fact of its being a non-reproductive process excluded the idea of its application to the various commercial and valuable purposes for which the great principle of photographic representa- tion was seen to be so strikingly available . they are no more available for the popular uses of Art than are the costly illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum” (119, emphasis in original).4 This preference for the reproducible was encoded into popular instruction books, such as the 1857 manual The A B C of Photography, which notes that the value of a negative is “in its power of producing an unlimited number of positives on paper” (ii).5 As this range of texts indicates, the negative’s value as a means of offering multiple reproductions became a common motif throughout the century, noted in philosophical essays, utilitarian instruction manuals for beginners, and specialist articles in the periodical press. Yet photographic reproduction was not unvaryingly praised. Photogra- phy “must make a revolution in art,” acknowledged Nathaniel Parker Willis and Timothy O. Porter in their 1839 essay, “The Pencil of Nature: A New Discovery” (46). However, they express concern over this revolution when it comes to the imitative quality of photographic reproduction: People prefer a poor representation of an object made by a human hand to the beauty of the thing itself. They will throw away a leaf, a flower, of exquisite beauty, and treasure up the veriest daub, that shall have the slightest resemblance to it. We are afraid something of this indifference will arise from the new invention [of photography]. If this view be correct, it may be presumed that the number of artists will be greatly lessened.
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